Here’s something to put on your calendar – Mary Strand at the Aster Cafe on Aug 19 for her albums release for Golden Girl. The music feels post-punk pop, with a quirky retro-1980s feel. The songs are fun and funny. Should be a great show.
Celebrating you debut album, Golden Girl, what brought you to music? It’s fun, clever and danceable! Reminds me of Tracy Ullman back in the day.
Thanks for the fun comparison to Tracey Ullman! It gave me an excuse to check out a couple of her old music videos!
I’ve always loved music, but I grew up as an athlete, although I had the obligatory four years of piano lessons. In college I worked in a country-rock bar and listened to live bands several nights a week. Loved it! But I became a lawyer, then a novelist, and then I sent my two kids off to music lessons at their request: drums and a little guitar for my son and piano for my daughter. In 2010, while I was writing a young adult (YA) series that included a teen basement rock band, the fourth novel (Livin’ La Vida Bennet) featured a heroine who decided to take guitar lessons. So, to make it more authentic, I took guitar lessons … and that was my start, although I tapered off after two or three years. A few years later a friend talked me into playing in a band through Twin Town Guitars. That led me to everything I’m doing now: more bands, singing (in addition to playing guitar), songwriting, and now putting my music out into the world. Ryan Smith and Mark Wade at Twin Town were and still are my major musical mentors and supporters.
Alexa Please? Please! What inspired you to memorialize the technology icon?
It was actually an accident and quite hilarious. A little over a year ago, I spent a weekend in Washington, D.C., with several close friends who are also novelists. One morning, we decided to do a “write-in,” each of us working on our respective novels, but I had just released three novels and was taking a break to focus on music. So I decided to write songs that morning. As we sat around a table writing, or pretending to write, we were all chatting. One woman told us about some annoying thing her husband had done just that morning, and she jokingly said, “I really need to find myself a boyfriend.” The phone of the woman sitting next to her immediately blurted out, “BOYFRIEND has been added to your shopping list.” When we all stopped laughing, I wrote the lyrics to “Alexa Please.” They poured out of me right in that moment.
I Don’t Want to Be Your Yesterday was written with Sarah Morris as part of the singer-songwriter challenge, can you tell us about the process? How does is differ from writing alone, especially once you decide the song is going to be on the album?
Co-writing is a blast! I normally write alone, and “I Don’t Want to Be Your Yesterday” was my first co-write. (I did another co-write with Ted Hajnasiewicz this year.) The great thing about co-writing is that you bring the strengths of each songwriter, but you do need to find common ground to sing about. For Sarah and me, it was really easy. (Very easy with Ted, too!) Sarah usually starts a song by going for a long run. I often start by going for a long walk, dictating lyrics and sometimes melodies into the voice memo app on my phone. So we each took that week’s songwriting prompt off by ourselves, for a run or walk, then spent the rest of that day exchanging notes and voice memos filled with lyric and melody ideas, and playing off of each other’s ideas. After a day of that back-and-forth, we got together at Sarah’s house and spent two or three hours creating the song together and then shooting a video of it. It was very spontaneous and collaborative, we laughed a lot, and the song we wrote managed to sound like both of us. To me, that’s the goal on a co-write: making the end result sound very much like a mix of each of the songwriters.
I will say, though, that I had no idea that the song would appear on my album at the time we wrote it. I was already deep into the recording of Golden Girl when Sarah and I co-wrote “I Don’t Want to Be Your Yesterday,” but it felt like a perfect addition to the album mix.
What is it like to have your son be the drummer?
Ha! It’s probably a better experience for me than for my son! Jack started playing drums at the start of middle school, and I knew immediately that he was a natural. His focus for several years was on jazz, and then funk, and he spent nearly half of college as a jazz major before switching to Spanish. (My kids and I all speak Spanish.) He’s now 25, and he plays drums in different genres of music. When I started writing songs, especially for the singer-songwriter challenge, I sometimes asked him to sit in with me just for fun when I had to video my latest new song. Jack also played in a couple of Twin Town bands with me. Then a few of us started a pop-rock band, Dodging Potholes, and he was initially our drummer. He’s a talented drummer who knows what he wants to do and how to do it, and I both love and respect that. When I started working on my album with Ryan and Mark, I knew I wanted Jack to play drums on it.
In the recording studio, though, the whole “mom and son” thing can be a somewhat tricky proposition. Jack and I are both musicians, and when we’re with other musicians, he obviously wants to be viewed as the drummer in the room and not my son. On the other hand, it’s my album, so I need to have the final say on how I want it to sound. We recorded drums at Flowers Studio, with Kris Johnson as engineer and either Mark or Ryan in the studio with Jack and me. I quickly realized that Jack didn’t want a lot of comments from me in front of the others, so I usually talked to Kris, Ryan, or Mark about the drums, then let one of them make the direct suggestions to Jack on tweaks. But what really worked for us was that Jack and I would get together at his drum studio a few days before a recording session, and he’d show me how he wanted to handle each song, and we discussed possibilities until it sounded good to both of us. That allowed me, at Flowers, to step back and not be the “mom” in the recording studio. It worked well, and I love Jack’s drums on the album.
Please tell us about the upcoming album release.
We’re doing a CD release show at the Aster Cafe on Saturday, August 19, from 9-11pm. Since Ryan and Mark are both in The Melismatics, we had planned from the start that The Melismatics would be part of the album release show, but the Aster is such a wonderfully intimate setting, not really the right place for a lot of loud rock. So we decided to dial back the volume for the CD release show, although we still hope/plan to do a separate vinyl release show later in the fall, with full-on rock. For the CD release show at the Aster, the lineup will be Ryan Smith and Mark Wade of the Melismatics playing an acoustic show, Little Man also playing an acoustic show, and my full album band (Ryan, Mark, Jack, and me) playing the songs from my album. Our part of the show WILL be electric and full-on rock, just like on my album. Sarah Morris will make a special guest appearance, singing with me on our song, “I Don’t Want to Be Your Yesterday.” She’ll also throw in more of her cool harmonies on my song, “Act As If,” which ends on the album with a three-person but 20-track a capella “chorus.” We hope to recreate that as best we can! We’re really looking forward to the show and think it’ll be a special night.
Thanks so much for this!
Mostly Minnesota 